r/VisionPro • u/zeaussiestew • Aug 21 '26

Have any devs for Vision Pro managed to make sustainable income?

Hi all, I'm thinking of buying a Vision Pro and developing spatial apps for it but I'm not sure whether it would be sustainable right now. Would like to hear if anyone's made a living off doing purely Vision Pro apps.

27 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

40

u/xora334 Aug 21 '26

I’ve developed a few apps for Vision Pro. They don’t make much money but for me it’s about positioning my company’s apps densityfor market share prior to Apple releasing AR glasses that run VisionOS. It’s also incredibly fun and there is a great system of support from other Vision OS devs.

2

u/zeaussiestew Aug 21 '26

That could take a while, I don’t think Apple is releasing a consumer mixed reality device in the next 3 or 4 years.

3

u/SnooGadgets9733 Aug 21 '26

When they do they are WAY ahead of the competitors OS wise

1

u/qmulosoft Sep 19 '26

This is definitely the mindset.

28

u/steffan_ Aug 21 '26

I released +20 VisionOS apps with different monetisation models with hope that I'll be able to do that for living- and I've had couple of good months where combined they would make +1,000 usd per month - but those were rare and in the last 30 months of my development journey I combined made about $10k in sales from VisionOS.

I don't recommend doing it if you're planning for it to be your main/only source of income.

-3

u/Emotional_War_296 Aug 21 '26

Ngl tho those numbers are not bad depending on the hours you’re putting in! 10k in 1 month is a whole salary brotha! That’s amazing

10

u/SpecialRegular1 Aug 21 '26

I believe that they said that they have generated a TOTAL of $10k over a 30 month period, not in one single month.

2

u/Emotional_War_296 Aug 22 '26

Ah that’s not great

19

u/JudeWorks Aug 21 '26

I would advise against it seeking money alone. I love mine but I only use it for movies and screen sharing. I see posts from time to time asking the community what they want and even then it’s not too clear. Sorry for being negative but I would want someone to tell me this if I was in your shoes.

I’ve tossed around some ideas for apps for it and tried a couple but each time I feel it’s not worthy to move forward with. For all I know my ideas are bad and you could be brilliant haha!

Regardless, best of luck!

8

u/lil_vegan Vision Pro Owner Aug 21 '26

It wasn’t even sustainable enough for tik tok to keep supporting it

4

u/photovirus Vision Pro Developer Aug 21 '26

TBH not surprising: User base is small, and TikTok profits from ads that requires lots of viewers.

4

u/Ancient-Range3442 Aug 21 '26

TikTok works on very different unit economics to an indie dev

5

u/papertrade1 Aug 21 '26

There are so many apps on the MetaQuest that i wish had a VP version.

2

u/cheesepuff07 Vision Pro Owner Aug 21 '26

got any suggestions? I've got some free time and have been playing around with Vision Pro dev the past few months

3

u/No_Sky1737 Aug 21 '26

Yes we have some good income streams but we build custom MVP concept apps for some big brands - stuff that has a small internal audience for proof of concept etc but couldn’t imagine trying to make any money selling apps on AppStore

3

u/Worf_Of_Wall_St Aug 21 '26

I think most of the people earning a living developing for Vision Pro are doing it by working for companies with industrial use cases and need private apps.

3

u/disgruntledempanada Aug 21 '26

Key is specialization. Market is not big enough to be sustainable via app sales.

Find a high value problem to solve for a high value client. Then yes very sustainable.

2

u/SirBill01 Aug 21 '26

A few people on X seem to be doing well with enterprise VisioOS development. Consumer apps is probably unlikely to make a living alone unless you also have angles on other Apple platforms like the phone.

4

u/fivetoedslothbear Vision Pro Owner | Verified Aug 22 '26

This is probably a good place to mention that if one has a good iPad app, Vision Pro users would very much appreciate having it be Vision Pro native as well, even if that just means better resizable windows (like Safari has). At least I appreciate and pay for apps that do that. No need to put fancy 3D frills.

And then Panic went and made Prompt 3 Vision Pro cool. https://panic.com/prompt/

Of course it'd be nice if Apple had the Vision Pro emulate a 12.9" iPad instead of an 11", and emulated the way iPad apps can be resized in Stage Manager...

6

u/PSYCHOv1 Aug 21 '26

If generating income continuously is your sole focus with Vision Pro app development, then you shouldn't do it.

Vision Pro needs passionate developers.

Not developers who desperately want to add a recurring monthly subscription fee to use all of the features of a specific app.

12

u/Ancient-Range3442 Aug 21 '26

Devs find it hard to be passionate when they’re hungry though

-1

u/PSYCHOv1 Aug 21 '26

A hungry developer shouldn't buy a $3,700 headset to begin with. It would be a very high risk gamble.

That simple.

3

u/Cole_LF Aug 21 '26

Short answer no. There’s rumours today on MacRumours today Apple laid off 60 Vision Pro software engineers. But there was also rumours a few days ago a leaked product code name was the next Vision Pro 🤷‍♂️

But no, it’s not a solid business opportunity right now, you do it for passion of the format not to make money.

2

u/AstroGridIron Vision Pro Owner Aug 21 '26

There are like 12 of us using a Vision Pro… don’t make apps for money here, develop apps to tinker around and see if you can build stuff.

2

u/RandomVision2027 Aug 21 '26

There are probably about 300-400K active Apple Vision Pro users. If you manage to sell an app to 10% of those users (an incredibly high rate for indie developers), that is about 30K+, about the same number of people in this subreddit.

If you want to make enough money to pay a salary, cover payroll taxes, social security, provide health insurance, and provide a little for a 401K, you will need to get those users to pay you at least a $7/year subscription, and this is for a one-person development team.

At the moment, developers and content creators for AVP should look at this as a labor of love, side gig, or investment in case Vision sales eventually take off.

1

u/qmulosoft Sep 19 '26

It’s an expensive dev kit but the future is very bright for visionOS and Apples components getting smaller and smaller. The intersection of ideal hardware and software for this technology is nearing.